Our mission

To provide the AI community with a not-for-profit
publisher with a heavy-weight scientific
board that publishes open access proceedings, monographs
and collected works which are available electronically
for free and in hard copy at close to cost.

What's currently wrong?

Scientific publishing is big business, worth over $2 Billion annually
in sales. Around one quarter of
output is in books. Journal publishing
has benefitted immensely from the competition
provided by open and online operations. By comparison,
book publishing is
old fashioned and fails to serve the scientific
community well.

There are many problems.
Books are over-priced. Publishers are reluctant to produce
new editions. Open access to books is very rare. Authors
get limited feedback from publishers about sales
or downloads. Publishers have been slow to embrace
the full potential of electronic publishing. We could
go on.
As with journals, much of the value in book publishing
comes from us, the scientists. We
write the text. We review. We edit. With print on demand
and electronic publishing, it is not hard to reproduce much
of what publishers provide

Our vision

Online journals like the
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
(JAIR) have helped transform scientific publishing.
We believe that book publishing can be transformed in a similar way.
JAIR's publisher, the AI Access Foundation has therefore
decided to become a not-for-profit publisher
of scientific books that
cover the full range of topics in AI.
All books will be open access, available for
free electronically. The books published
by AI Access will be selected by a heavy weight
scientific board, and will always be
peer reviewed. An online whitepaper
goes into more details.